While He Protected Her, I Stopped Loving Him

Adriana's POV

There were waffles set at the two ends of the long dining table, golden and perfect on cold white china, and I crossed the obsidian floor to take the chair at the far end. The morning light came in thin through the tall windows of the safe house, catching the silver and the crystal, the kind of quiet luxury Lorenzo surrounded himself with the way other men surrounded themselves with guns. The room smelled of espresso and warm sugar and, beneath it, the leather of his coat draped over a chair near the door. A grandfather clock somewhere down the hall ticked, slow and patient, and it was the loudest thing in the house.

Lorenzo sat at the other end of the table, far enough away that we might have been seated at two separate tables in two separate lives. He watched me the way he watched men he hadn't decided whether to trust.

"Why did you change the passcode on your tablet?" he asked, his eyes fixed on me.

The tablet had been a gift, bought for my twenty-fifth birthday, and he had been the one to set the passcode for me with those careful, possessive fingers, as though programming a thing he owned. I had changed it the day I learned he'd gone driving up into the hills with Carla, the two of them alone on a road that led nowhere a man takes his wife.

He hadn't even noticed until now. That was the part that sat coldest in my chest. Weeks of silence between us, and the first thing to draw his attention back to me was a string of four digits he could no longer command.

"No reason," I said, and I chewed my waffle slowly, letting the word settle without weight, without invitation.

A frown gathered at his brow. His thumb moved to the heavy signet ring on his hand and began to turn it, a slow roll against his knuckle, the way he did when he was telling himself something he half believed. "The sit-down is tonight. The inter-family gala. You've always wanted to stand at my side at these things." His voice had gone cold and even, the tone he used in rooms full of men who answered to him. "Do you want to come as my wife?"

I almost laughed. Carla had been the woman on his arm at every Family affair since the day he made her a capo in her own right, paraded through every gala and every neutral-ground meeting like a trophy he was daring the other Dons to covet. I went with my friends, or I went alone, or I did not go at all and no one marked the empty chair. So what had changed? Why now, when the alliance of bloodlines between us was already a corpse he simply hadn't buried yet?

But if I refused him, he would grow suspicious, and a suspicious Lorenzo was a careful one. He had signed my release back to the Valente Family without ever reading what his own hand was putting its name to, and that signature was the only thing standing between me and the rest of my life. I would not give him a reason to look twice at anything. Not yet. Not while the ink was still drying somewhere in my luggage.

Under the edge of the table, where he could not see, I turned my bare ring finger inward against my palm, pressing the empty place where his band used to sit until the phantom of it ached.

I didn't look at him as I rose from the chair. "Sure," I said.

That night the sit-down took place in the grand hall of an old marble building the Families used for their fragile truces, neutral ground where four bloodlines could share the same air and pretend the air wasn't thick with old debts. Chandeliers threw warm gold over men in dark suits and women in silk, over the slow circling of capos who never quite turned their backs to one another, over the quiet shapes of bodyguards standing along the walls like furniture that breathed. I sat at our table with Lorenzo beside me, close enough that the other Dons would see it, far enough that I felt nothing of his warmth.

"Are you enjoying yourself?" Lorenzo asked, his gaze sliding sideways to the boredom I hadn't bothered to hide.

I nodded, and I did not spare him so much as a glance.